The best thing that could happen in Iraq

John Arquilla and Todd Feinburg

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, August 24, 2008

The "October Surprise" is a time-honored tradition in election-year politics. This time around, bombing Iran would be the worst sort of surprise. But the best possible surprise might unfold right next door - in Iraq.

From our respective perches inside and outside the Defense Department, we are picking up open hints of a possible swift, deep drawdown in U.S. forces there that would take place long before the 2011 deadline apparently set by the impending troop withdrawal agreement between Washington and Baghdad. Aside from the happy shock of a much earlier than anticipated reduction announcement itself, the most unexpected aspect of such a development would be the tacit admission that the sheer numbers added by last year's surge had little to do with improvements in Iraq in the first place.

Instead, things got better because of our willingness to negotiate with Sunni insurgents and to build a network of small outposts to protect Iraqis where they were most vulnerable.

All 23 Sunni tribes in Anbar province quickly switched sides in response to our blandishments. But the big tactical adjustment was that Gen. David Petraeus took a few thousand soldiers and moved them off of forward operating bases the size of small cities and redeployed them, platoon by platoon, onto the streets.

There, like police on foot patrol, they could swiftly respond to acts of terror and take the fight to the enemy. A major corner was turned when we shifted to this "outpost and outreach" approach, with violence soon dropping by about 75 percent.

So, on any given day, about 5,000 American troops are now stationed at just over 100 outposts, paired with platoons of Iraqis, and directly supported by about 15,000 more Americans.

This still leaves more than 130,000 U.S. troops sitting in our huge forward operating bases, waiting, perhaps, for an old-fashioned war to begin. They are there to satisfy the "just in case" anxiety that keeps our generals thinking that conventional troop formulas and tactics are still relevant in this age of irregular warfare.

They cling to the old approach against monumental evidence that the world has changed and that old ways of thinking about the necessary scale of expeditionary forces are no longer justified.

This means, of course, that the first four years of the war in Iraq were largely wasted. We could have shifted to outposts and outreach at almost any time since 2003, cutting short the suffering of the Iraqi people and reducing our own casualties. To those who would argue that such a shift would have imperiled our forces, we observe simply that, since the concept of small outposts was put into use, whenever insurgents have tried to mount large-scale attacks, they have been destroyed by a combination of good soldiering and airpower. Not a single small outpost has ever been overrun.

For these reasons, we call for a dramatic, two-thirds reduction of U.S. troops in Iraq over a short period of time, bringing us down to about 50,000. Further, we would reduce the proportion of our forces on forward operating bases down from 90 percent, where it is today, to about 60 percent, or 30,000. The remaining 20,000 would be used to expand significantly the network of outposts. Thus, far more troops would be in better position to bring sustainable security to the Iraqi people until they can sustain themselves.

A great opportunity awaits whoever has the wit, and the grit, to take up the cudgels for this plan.

Barack Obama should adopt it immediately. He has already signaled a move away from his initial drawdown plan, one that lacked the concept of operations that ours offers. By embracing a proposal that could work well and quickly, Obama would simultaneously remain anti-war and become pro-military. This might just win him the election.

John McCain should also take up this path immediately. He would escape any innuendos aimed at painting him as trigger-happy, and rid him of the problem that his stay-the-course-for-a-century policy ignores: that our troops are tired and need to come home. By demonstrating that there is a way of being pro-war while embracing a concept of operations that is smarter and more scaled-down, McCain might just win the election.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki should support this plan immediately as well. The rapid reduction of two-thirds of U.S. troops that our plan calls for would allow him to tamp down any lingering suspicions - among his supporters and opponents - about the sincerity of the U.S. commitment to remove all combat forces by 2011.

Finally, George W. Bush, a commander in chief with a track record of embracing bold initiatives, should adopt this approach. Offering a rational plan that swiftly and sharply reduces our forces in Iraq, and creatively redeploys those that remain, would be a balm to the American people, and a blessing to a world that longs for a sign that we still possess a special mix of compassion and ingenuity.